Skinner’s Quote of the Day

Two scientists may stop talking shop while in a crowded elevator if they are sensitive to an additional audience which may react to their verbal behavior as gibberish. If the…

The presence of a negative audience can be detected only in combination with a positive audience, since its effect is felt as a reduction in the strength of behavior appropriate…

When we use a measure of opinion to predict behavior, we argue that because one response in a thematic group has been made, other responses in the same group are…

TWO FACTS EMERGE from our survey of the basic functional relations in verbal behavior: (1) the strength of a single response may be, and usually is, a function of more…

Verbal behavior is shaped and sustained by a verbal environment—by people who respond to behavior in certain ways because of the practices of the group of which they are members.…

A preliminary restriction would be to limit the term verbal to instances in which the responses of the “listener” have been conditioned . . . If we make the further…

To say that we are interested only in behavior which has an effect upon the behavior of another individual does not go far enough, for the definition embraces all social…

When the mediating “listener” participates merely in his role as a physical object, there is no reason to distinguish a special field. The prizefighter or the physician achieves certain results…

Now that we have examined the variables of which a verbal response is a function, it will be helpful to restrict our definition by excluding instances of “speaking” which are…

It is a happy condition when the speaker who is talking primarily to himself achieves an effect upon himself at approximately the same time as upon his listeners (p. 223)

Once a response of this type [tact, echoic, textual, or intraverbal behavior] has been emitted, it automatically establishes a condition under which, in view of the reinforcing practices of the…

Although we are especially interested in variables which generate and maintain verbal behavior, it is useful to consider the conditions under which behavior comes to an end. (p. 220)

An extinguished response is not forgotten. It is simply not emitted in the circumstances in which it has been extinguished. This may be shown by changing the circumstances. (p. 207)

... verbal behavior receives intermittent reinforcement, and this fact has many important consequences. For example, we behave verbally with a great deal less assurance than nonverbally, but we are less…

Differential reinforcement shapes up all verbal forms, and when a prior stimulus enters into the contingency, reinforcement is responsible for its resulting control. (pp. 203-204)

There are many situations ... in which silence is used as a punishment, and it is therefore well to avoid any silence which may be interpreted as punishment. Certain standard…

In acquiring a verbal repertoire the speaker does not necessarily become a listener, and in acquiring the behavior characteristic of a listener he does not spontaneously become a speaker. (p.…

What has been damaged in aphasia is clearly the functional control of the behavior, and the damage respects the lines of control. (p. 195)

The pathological condition of verbal behavior called aphasia often emphasizes functional differences which are hard to understand in terms of the traditional account ... The aphasic has lost some of…

The “word” as a unit of analysis is appropriate to the practices of the community rather than the behavior of the individual speaker. (p. 190)

Classifications of responses are useful only in separating various types of controlling relations, and some responses may show features of both mand and tact. (p. 189)

... a verbal response of given form sometimes seems to pass easily from one type of operant to another. The speaker commonly starts with a tact and then appears to…

... we cannot tell from form alone into which class a response falls. Fire may be (1) a mand to a firing squad, (2) a tact to a conflagration, (3)…

 ... there are no true synonyms, for when all variables have been specified there is no remaining choice of terms. (p. 183)

Among the effects of excessive or inconsistent punishment are many neurotic symptoms, including the “repression” of some areas of verbal behavior. It is often necessary for the psychotherapist to establish…

The effect of a weak audience variable is evident in talking on the telephone. Frequent stimulation from the listener is necessary to support verbal behavior in strength. Are you there?…

If we define a proposition as “something which may be said in any language,” then instead of trying to identify the “something,” we may ask why there are different languages.…

An audience ... is a discriminative stimulus in the presence of which verbal behavior is characteristically reinforced and in the presence of which, therefore, it is characteristically strong. Discriminative stimuli…

There is no evidence that punishment ultimately reduces a tendency to respond. Its principal effect is to convert the behavior, or the circumstances under which the behavior characteristically occurs, into…

The assumption that a punishing consequence simply reverses the effect of a reinforcing consequence has not survived experimental analysis. (p. 166)

The vain man is reinforced by hearing or seeing his name, and he speaks or writes it frequently himself. Boasting is a way to “hear good things said about oneself.”…

“Autistic” verbal behavior may be compared with that of the musician playing for himself. Other things being equal, he plays music which, as listener, he finds reinforcing. In other words,…

Reinforcing sounds in the child’s environment provide for the automatic reinforcement of vocal forms. Such sounds need not be verbal; the child is reinforced automatically when he duplicates the sounds…

An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin. (p. 163)

The therapist may begin with a number of statements which are so obviously true that the listener’s behavior is strongly reinforced. Later a strong reaction is obtained to statements which…

Our belief in what someone tells us is similarly a function of, or identical with, our tendency to act upon the verbal stimuli which he provides. (p. 160)

In a well-known experiment, Diven recorded changes in the resistance of the skin of the hand produced by the reflex secretion of sweat which is often a conspicuous feature of…

The distortion due to differential generalized reinforcement may be traced in the behavior of the troubadour or in the history of the art of fiction. The troubadour begins, let us…

GENERALIZED REINFORCEMENT is the key to successful practical and scientific discourse. It brings the speaker’s behavior most narrowly under the control of the current environment and permits the listener to…

I shall go skiing tomorrow is not, of course, literally a response to future behavior. No matter how we may interpret past events, as in the examples given above, it…

. . . when the child says There was an elephant at the zoo, he appears to be reacting to his past history rather than merely profiting from it. This…

What is the time limit on the stimuli controlling tacts? Show a child a watch and say What is that? and the response Watch is fairly easily explained. Show him…

Greater ease of execution is only one reason why behavior becomes covert. Another kind of consequence of verbal behavior . . . is commonly called punishment. An important distinction between…

Verbal behavior is especially likely to drop below the overt level, because it can continue to receive reinforcement by being useful to the speaker in many ways. (p. 141)

It is only through the gradual growth of a verbal community that the individual becomes ‘conscious’ (p. 140)

A man’s report of his own behavior is widely used in the social sciences, from cultural anthropology to psychophysics, and the reliability of the informant or subject is a crucial…

Self-descriptive verbal behavior is of interest for many reasons. Only through the acquisition of such behavior does the speaker become “aware” of what he is doing or saying, and why.…

The extensive verbal behavior usually called animism may have little to do with private stimuli. It may represent a stage in the growth of a verbal environment in which responses…

If we observe that an animal cowers or retreats when someone approaches, we call it afraid, not because we read into the animal our own private accompaniments of fear but…

The response His face is familiar cannot be formulated in the same way as His face is red. The condition responsible for familiar is not in the stimulus but in…